Numerous types of foods, including beverages, are packed or bottled as a hot-fill product or otherwise are heated. The result is a hot container of food.
Generally, it is highly desirable to cool the hot containers of food quickly. First, some of the foods can degrade if they are not cooled quickly due to overcooking, bacterial action or due to chemical reactions, sometimes with the container. Second, without quickly cooling the containers, the containers would have to be stored and removed from storage prior to labeling, which is highly inefficient. Thus, there is a need for quickly cooling containers of hot food.
Prior art container cooling methods have not been designed to cool bottles efficiently and quickly. They often contain multiple cooling zones where each zone uses coolants of different temperatures. In some cases, coolant is sprayed in one zone, collected and sprayed in a second zone so that the flow of containers relative to the flow of coolant approximates countercurrent. Although countercurrent flow is very efficient in liquid-liquid heat exchangers, countercurrent flow is very inefficient for this application. Countercurrent flow requires multiple pumps, controls, and more complicated piping to be implemented for the purpose of cooling containers. Hence, there is a need to cool containers efficiently with less equipment.